Integrating highly customized workloads into new systems can be a long, painful process

'You'll get this complete, big whine from every single department and every single part of your business to customize,' said Mark Frissora, chief executive officer and president of Caesars Entertainment Corp.. Pictured: The marquee at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Aug. 21, 2017
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Chief information officers and other corporate IT managers have a new four-letter word: Customization.

Once considered a major selling point by enterprise software vendors, customizable applications and platforms for payroll, inventory, human resources and other business operations can become costly headaches as companies shift more workloads into the cloud, CIOs and industry analysts say.

How bad can it be? Patrick Benson, CIO of golf and country club operator ClubCorp. Holdings Inc., says his rule is “death before customization.”

Integrating highly customized workloads into new systems is a long, painful process, Mr. Benson said. Even after successfully shifting customized tools to the cloud, they face an ongoing risk of glitches during periodic software updates, a hallmark of cloud computing services, he said.

There are also added complexities involved in upgrading customized workloads to include new capabilities, he added, such as artificial intelligence or deep learning tools.

When ClubCorp began the process of digitizing its operations about three years ago, Mr. Benson said customized IT systems at different clubs across the country – including, in some cases, paper membership forms in manila envelopes – caused lengthy delays in modernization efforts: “We were basically painted into a corner,” he said.

Chris Fletcher, a Gartner Inc. research analyst, said companies want to offer unique features and services in customer-facing apps, in order to stand out from competitors. But they need to weigh the value of customizing back-end tools, given all the added problems they create, he said.

In most cases, he added, the “as-is” software offered by cloud vendors works just as well, if not better, while avoiding added maintenance and governance costs.

“You find that on the business side, in marketing and sales for instance, they’re really interested in having highly customized systems, without considering the integration or update issues down the road,” he said.

That can lead to friction between business and IT managers, he added.

“You’ll get this complete, big whine from every single department and every single part of your business to customize,” Mark Frissora, chief executive officer and president of Caesars Entertainment Corp., told IT managers this week at Oracle Corp.’s annual IT industry conference in New York.

“But it’s so important,” he added, “if you’re going to do a systems change, you don’t customize any of it. Zero customization.”

He called customization a “big no-no.”

Caesars Entertainment partnered with Oracle about two years ago to begin digitizing its workloads, aiming to shift 100% of its operations into the cloud by 2020, Mr. Frissora said.

But the company ran into an early snag with a series of highly customized Enterprise Resource Planning tools, or ERPs, spread across several business units: “There was a feeling at the business-unit level that we had to have unique characteristics on the ERP system, for the different businesses.”

He described the process of integrating the tools into the new cloud system as “a train wreck.”

Beyond difficulties with integration issues, the company’s customized legacy systems were also pricey to maintain, he said, with legacy tools for general ledger and accounts payable services alone costing up to $15 million a year to operate, compared to $3 million for “as-is” cloud tools.

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Hi. Just fyi, as part of the changes mentioned in this article, ClubCorp outsourced work to an Indian company (HCL Technologies) and had ClubCorp employees, myself included, train HCL's Indian employees (both onshore and offshore) while telling us that we would NOT be laid off. ClubCorp then laid us off.